Biotechnology Venture Capital Investments is an authoritative, insiders perspective on the ins and outs of biotechnology venture capital and the unique factors surrounding venture capital in this ever-evolving industry. Featuring managing directors and partners representing some of the nations top VC firms, this book provides tactical advice for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs on structuring investments and negotiating deal terms. These industry experts offer proven strategies for establishing valuations, putting together a management team, evaluating risk, and overcoming many of the challenges involved specifically within the biotech industry. From examining term sheets to working with founders, these experts articulate methods for approaching deals strategically and funding appropriately based on key milestones. The different niches represented and the breadth of perspectives presented enable readers to get inside some of the great minds powering the biotech venture world, as experts offer up their thoughts around the keys to success within this fascinating industry where science, investing, and deal-making intersect...

Wm. Blake Winchell is a member of the World President’s Organization (www.wpo.org) and is an adjunct professor at IE Business School in Madrid, Spain, one Europe's leading business schools, where he teaches highly rated courses on Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital and Entrepreneurial Acquisition (Search Funds). He is also on the IE Business School International Advisory Board.

Blake received his M.B.A. from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and he is a Certified Public Accountant. He earned his B.A. from Dartmouth College with high honors in English and Economics; he was a Rufus Choate Scholar and received the Henley Economics Award.

Thursday, 01 January 2015

In Winners Dream, Bill McDermott—the CEO of the world’s largest business software company, SAP—chronicles how relentless optimism, hard work, and disciplined execution embolden people and equip organizations to achieve audacious goals.

Growing up in working-class Long Island, a sixteen-year-old Bill traded three hourly wage jobs to buy a small deli, which he ran by instinctively applying ideas that would be the seeds for his future success. After paying for and graduating college, Bill talked his way into a job selling copiers door-to-door for Xerox, where he went on to rank number one in every sales position he held and eventually became the company’s youngest-ever corporate officer. Eventually, Bill left Xerox and in 2002 became the unlikely president of SAP’s flailing American business unit. There, he injected enthusiasm and accountability into the demoralized culture by scaling his deli, sales, and management strategies. In 2010, Bill was named co-CEO, and in May 2014 became SAP’s sole, and first non-European, CEO.

Colorful and fast-paced, Bill’s anecdotes contain effective takeaways: gutsy career moves; empathetic sales strategies; incentives that yield exceptional team performance; and proof of the competitive advantages of optimism and hard work. At the heart of Bill’s story is a blueprint for success and the knowledge that the real dream is the journey, not a preconceived destination.

Monday, 24 November 2014

It is rare to find a writing emperor, but even more an emperor who wished to be a philosopher rather than wear the purple. This is the case of Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE), known as the last good emperor of the Antonine's dynasty in the Second Century of our era, when the Barbarians besieged the Roman Empire. You may be familiar with his image if you visited Capitol Hill in Rome, where his colossal equestrian statute remains because early Christians believed it represented St. Peter.

Marcus Aurelius lived in times when Rome was experiencing both internal and external turbulence. Internally, different political and cultural opposing streams concurred: in religion, the fight between defendants of the old faith in Roman deities and Christians was starting to erode old beliefs associated with traditional Roman customs and Law; in philosophy, stoics, epicureans, and supporters of imported doctrines of Plato and other Greek philosophers contended to become the standard. Marcus Aurelius was, by education and self-cultivation, a stoic. Basically, stoics defended personal self-control, the subjection of the own senses to the mind, the acceptance of nature –they professed some sort of pantheism- and of given state of things, in order to achieve perfection.

This spirit influences Marcus Aurelius “Meditations”, which exude some form of holiness and sanctity. In fact, at his death, after a battle on the Danube Front (the hit movieGladiator here at least was accurate), he was declared sacred, being the last Roman emperor to be considered part of the deities. Why did he write this book? The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains that “by reflecting upon philosophical ideas and, perhaps more importantly, writing them down, Marcus Aurelius engages in a repetitive process designed to habituate his mind into a new way of thinking”.

Allow me to formulate a first takeaway from this. Writing a blog or a diary that reflect your ideas and thoughts is a beneficial practice for at least two reasons: First, by describing your actions you may give further meaning to your decisions and your behavior. Second, it is an excellent way to formulate explicitly your beliefs and values, reshape and interiorize them.

Many of the maxims in the “Meditations” sound repetitive, but they may be recommendable at times when managers have to face deception, failures or any other sort of setback. I include a selection below:

II.1. Begin the morning by saying to yourself: I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial (…) I can neither be harmed by any of them (…) for we are made for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth.

II.14. Though you were to live three thousand years, or three million, still remember that no man losses any other life than this which now lives, or lives any other than this which he now loses.

An advice to those who look for places to retire and recharge the batteries –I declare myself guilty of this, since I am writing these lines at my little house in the country:

IV.3 Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores, and mountains, and you too are wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the common sort of man, for it is in your power, whenever you shall choose, to retire into yourself.

A further piece of advice to cultivate modesty; valuable since it comes from an emperor:

IV.3. But perhaps a longing for the thing called fame torments you. See how soon everything is forgotten; look at the chaos of infinite time on each side of the present, and the emptiness of applause, and the fickleness and poor judgement of those who pretend to praise, and the narrowness of the space within which it is confined. For the whole earth is but a point and in that how small a nook is this your dwelling, and how few are there within it, and what kind of people are they who will praise you?

Interestingly, Meditation has become a popular and effective practice among managers. The experience from the courses on meditation that we run at our School is very positive, and most participants say that meditation has helped them improve their personal balance and their professional performance. It also helps to develop positive leadership. Allow me a second takeaway from this article. If you have not experienced yet, I suggest you give meditation a try.

Going back to our protagonist, there are two aspects of Marcus Aurelius’ personality, which do not fit with the pure thoughts of his “Meditations”. First, he devoted most of his life to warfare. Second, his son Commodus –excellently played in the movie Gladiator by actor Joaquin Phoenix-, who became his successor, was not a very good apprentice, since he became one of the most deplorable emperors of Rome. However, this happens in the best of families, doesn’t it?

Why do we see so few electric cars on our streets today in spite of the overwhelming positive views on them? Why is it so difficult to introduce electronic patient journals in our hospitals or to phase out fossil-based energy sources? How come mobile telephones were developed and expanded so rapidly in the past two decades? How are integrated transport systems transforming commuting in large cities, and who contributes to that change? At a basic level these questions have to do with the way in which science and technology interact with society. It is commonplace today in social sciences literature that science, technology and society are constantly shaping each other in a truly co-constitutive process. However, these questions also have to do with the elements that form the socio-technical and innovation systems as well as with sociocultural and economic aspects in the intentionality towards (or against) change. This book argues for the need for a better understanding of governance of change in socio-technical systems and innovation systems. It develops a conceptual framework to understand change and studies governance of change in a range of selected case studies that mobilize this framework.

Andrew Pettigrew is Professor of Strategy and Organization at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford and Senior Golding Fellow, Brasenose College. He was Dean of the School of Management, University of Bath from 2003 to 2008 and before then held academic appointments at Yale University, London Business School, Warwick Business School and Harvard Business School where in 2001 he was a Visiting Professor. He also holds and Adjunct Professorship at BI, The Norwegian Business School. Andrew's research has pioneered the use of contextual and temporal analyses of organizational processes of strategy making, decision making, change and power. He is the author or editor of 16 books and has published in most of the top management journals in the world. He has been awarded many distinctions as a scholar. These include election as Distinguished Scholar of the Organization and Management Theory and Organization Development and Change Divisions of the Academy of Management.

In 2005 he received the John Bates Clark Medal awarded to economists under forty judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. In 2010 Foreign Policy listed him as one of the top 100 global thinkers.

..."The same applies to Greece and Spain. Fix politics, improve institutions, undertake structural reforms that encourage investment and innovation and create a level playing field for the population at large, and the Greek and Spanish people will be as hard-working and as innovative as Northern Europeans"...

In 2005 he received the John Bates Clark Medal awarded to economists under forty judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. In 2010 Foreign Policy listed him as one of the top 100 global thinkers.

..."The same applies to Greece and Spain. Fix politics, improve institutions, undertake structural reforms that encourage investment and innovation and create a level playing field for the population at large, and the Greek and Spanish people will be as hard-working and as innovative as Northern Europeans"...

Wednesday, 01 October 2014

"Decisive..." October 31, 2011 - We all know that change is hard. It's unsettling, it's time-consuming, and all too often we give up at the first sign of a setback.

Dan Heath is a Senior Fellow at Duke University's CASE center, which supports entrepreneurs who are fighting for social good. He is the co-author, along with his brother Chip, of two New York Times bestsellers: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die and Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.

A graduate of the University of Texas and Harvard Business School, he lives now in Raleigh, NC.

Chip Heath is a Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His research examines why certain ideas - ranging from urban legends to folk medical cures, from Chicken Soup for the Soul stories to business strategy myths - survive and prosper in the social marketplace of ideas. His research has appeared in a variety of academic journals, and popular accounts of his research have appeared in Scientific American, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, BusinessWeek, Psychology Today, and Vanity Fair. He lives in Los Gatos, California. Dan Heath is a consultant at Duke Corporate Education, one of the world's top providers of executive education. Prior to joining Duke, he was a researcher at Harvard Business School, writing 10 cases on entrepreneurship that are used in business school programmes.

"Fragile by Design bristles with insights about how conflicting private interests, intermediated through political institutions, have sometimes produced banking and social insurance arrangements that make financial crises much more likely than they should be."--Thomas Sargent, Nobel Laureate in Economics

"Fragile by Design explains why the U.S. banking crisis of 2007-2009 is no aberration, but only the latest episode of a populist bargain gone awry. This is a powerful entry in the debate on how to fix the postcrisis world."--Raghuram Rajan, author of Fault Lines

"A seminal political economy analysis of why banking varies so much across countries, with such profound consequences for economic development and social welfare. Not just fascinating and original, but also right."--James Robinson, author of Why Nations Fail

"A monumental intellectual and scholarly achievement that will shape thinking on finance and politics for decades to come. A book for the ages, whose insights are delivered in a lively, punchy, and nontechnical narrative."--Ross Levine, University of California, Berkeley

Why are banking systems unstable in so many countries--but not in others? The United States has had twelve systemic banking crises since 1840, while Canada has had none. The banking systems of Mexico and Brazil have not only been crisis prone but have provided miniscule amounts of credit to business enterprises and households. Analyzing the political and banking history of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil through several centuries, Fragile by Design demonstrates that chronic banking crises and scarce credit are not accidents due to unforeseen circumstances. Rather, these fluctuations result from the complex bargains made between politicians, bankers, bank shareholders, depositors, debtors, and taxpayers. The well-being of banking systems depends on the abilities of political institutions to balance and limit how coalitions of these various groups influence government regulations.

Fragile by Design is a revealing exploration of the ways that politics inevitably intrudes into bank regulation. Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber combine political history and economics to examine how coalitions of politicians, bankers, and other interest groups form, why some endure while others are undermined, and how they generate policies that determine who gets to be a banker, who has access to credit, and who pays for bank bailouts and rescues.

"Hong Kong is a wonderful, thriving society to be part of. If you don't believe me, go outside today," Sunil Kumar, dean and George Pratt Shultz Professor of Operations Management, said in his opening remarks at the inaugural ceremony’s keynote panel discussion, “Which Capitalism for the 21st Century?”

Impressed by Pres. Obama’s open mind. Today he invited me and other economists to lunch to better understand the needs of the country

SWEDEN continues to be one of the countries others look to for an answer to this fundamental question of our times: how can a country successfully combine increasing prosperity with a relatively egalitarian distribution?

...

For a period of about 100 years, from 1870 to 1970, Sweden managed to combine a wealth-generating capitalist economy with increasing equality. This remarkable development has led to the common misunderstanding that Sweden somehow shows that socialism can work. As I document in a new book, Sweden was not very socialist when prosperity accelerated. Swedish taxes were as low as those in the US (or even lower) until around 1960. It would be more correct to use Sweden as an example of how capitalism fosters prosperity...

Friday, 22 August 2014

Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (Amazon) - Free Press (August 19, 2014)

"William Deresiewicz is one of America's best young public intellectuals. He has written a passionate, deeply informed, and searing critique of the way we are educating our young. Whether you agree or disagree - and I found myself doing both - you must read this book. It should spark a great debate on America's campuses and beyond." (Fareed Zakaria, author of The Post-American World)

Friday, 08 August 2014

“Very few important subjects in American history have been the subject of as much disinformation and deliberate distortion as the events surrounding the financial crisis that broke in 2008. Tim Geithner’s candid, clear-headed, and refreshingly self-effacing account of his role in formulating the federal government’s response is a very welcome antidote. Geithner’s book is a triple threat (treat?): it is first-rate economic history, insightful political science, and, most important, a cogent exposition of the importance of adhering to the policies adopted in the aftermath of the crisis if we are to succeed in diminishing the likelihood of any recurrence.”

“The most practical and deep book ever written by a practitioner on the topic of innovation.”—Prof. Gary P. Pisano, Harvard Business School

“Many have attempted to formulate and categorize inspiration and creativity. What Ed Catmull shares instead is his astute experience that creativity isn’t strictly a well of ideas, but an alchemy of people. In Creativity, Inc. Ed reveals, with commonsense specificity and honesty, examples of how not to get in your own way and how to realize a creative coalescence of art, business, and innovation.”—George Lucas

“This is the best book ever written on what it takes to build a creative organization. It is the best because Catmull’s wisdom, modesty, and self-awareness fill every page. He shows how Pixar’s greatness results from connecting the specific little things they do (mostly things that anyone can do in any organization) to the big goal that drives everyone in the company: making films that make them feel proud of one another.”—Robert I. Sutton, Stanford professor and author of The No A**hole Rule and co-author of Scaling Up Excellence

Throughout 2013 the European Commission realised a thorough task of researching this field, in which the academic content of 1,091 training programs were analised of Universities and European Business schools, and surprising only 21 of these fulfilled the basic requirements of ICT employability. (IE Business School has three of the 21 programs)...

Kohlrieser’s book Hostage at the Table: How Leaders Can Overcome Conflict, Influence Others and Raise Performance received the Best Business Book Award 2007 from the Dirigeants Commerciaux de France (DCF), a French association of business leaders)[10] and the “Best Management Book 2008” award from Managementbuch.de,[11] the German business bookseller. Kohlrieser also received The BrandLaureate International Brand Personality Award in 2010[12]from the Asia Pacific Brands Foundation (APBF) for his contribution to the field of high-performance communication and the global European Case Clearing House (ECCH) Renewable and sustainable energy technology and development Hot Topic Case Award in 2011.[13]

Climate change. Income inequality. World poverty. Who can solve these global problems? Corporations. Never before have corporations been so large, so wealthy, so powerful, and so rich in human creativity and endeavor. Organizational change expert Professor Lynda Gratton shows that it is now critical that these corporations step up...

Join @lyndagratton for a webinar to celebrate the launch of her latest book 'The Key' Tues 10 June. Register: rsvp@hotspotsmovement.com

Last October I wandered across a little item on the topic of “overcoming resistance to change.” As happens in life, that phrase turned out to be the innocent trigger for a 9-month exercise which has resulted in the 100K-word, 737-page “collection” presented herewith.

“Resistance to change” conjures up images of “battles” and “conflict” and “winners” and “losers.” I get it—and I think it’s 100% ass backwards, to put it in blunt terms. The joy—and it is “joy”—of having a new, contrarian idea is seeking out colleagues who share it, jumping into the pond, and starting to splash around. That is, in my view, change agentry is about collecting and nurturing and playing with allies—not “vanquishing” “foes.”...

In their recent book, Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig convincingly make the case for much stronger and simpler borrowing limitations for banks. “Whatever else we do,” they write at the beginning of The Bankers’ New Clothes, “imposing significant restrictions on banks’ borrowing is a simple and highly cost-effective way to reduce risks to the economy without imposing any significant cost on society.” But they warn that the issue poses “a fundamental conflict between what is good for bankers privately and what is good for the broader economy.”

Admati, a professor at Stanford Business School, has been a leader in public debates on how best to regulate banks since at least 2010, when she brought together nineteen other finance professors, including Martin Hellwig, head of the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, and Nobel Laureate William Sharpe, to produce a famous letter, entitled “Healthy Banking System Is the Goal, Not Profitable Banks,” which appeared in the Financial Times that November and is elaborated in the book.

Home-field advantage is one of the most well-known ideas in sports, and one of the most misunderstood. In Scorecasting, Professor Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim compiled statistics on the probability of teams winning when they play at home. The results are striking.

Soccer has the largest average home advantage across leagues—ranging from a low of 60% winning rates in Asia/Africa to a high of 69.1% in US Major League Soccer.

The Great American Recession resulted in the loss of eight million jobs between 2007 and 2009. More than four million homes were lost to foreclosures. Is it a coincidence that the United States witnessed a dramatic rise in household debt in the years before the recession—that the total amount of debt for American householdsdoubled between 2000 and 2007 to $14 trillion? Definitely not. Armed with clear and powerful evidence, Atif Mian and Amir Sufi reveal in House of Debt how the Great Recession and Great Depression, as well as the current economic malaise in Europe, were caused by a large run-up in household debt followed by a significantly large drop in household spending.

Though the banking crisis captured the public’s attention, Mian and Sufi argue strongly with actual data that current policy is too heavily biased toward protecting banks and creditors. Increasing the flow of credit, they show, is disastrously counterproductive when the fundamental problem is too much debt. As their research shows, excessive household debt leads to foreclosures, causing individuals to spend less and save more. Less spending means less demand ...

“Mian and Sufi have produced some of the most important and compelling research on the impact of debt on consumer behavior during the recent housing bubble and bust. This excellent new book presents and expands this research in a rigorous, yet engaging and accessible way.”

Paul Krugman

“Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, our leading experts on the macroeconomic effects of private debt, have a new blog [www.houseofdebt.org]— and it has instantly become must reading.”

Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard University

“This is a profoundly important book that makes a huge range of serious empirical evidence on the financial crisis accessible to a broad readership. A compendium of Mian and Sufi’s own celebrated work would already be a spectacular contribution, but this book is so much more. Although the authors present all views in a balanced, scholarly way, their quiet insistence that we should have moved faster to write down household mortgages is well-reasoned and compelling.”

Carmen Reinhart, Harvard University

“Much has been written about the boom and subsequent bust that rocked the US economy during 2007–2009, but insightful and informed analysis is much rarer. This book is one of those rare gems. It offers an in-depth look at the state of housing, consumer credit, household incomes, and debt around the crisis and presents an informed discussion about its causes and consequences. The analysis of crisis resolution has resonance, not only for the United States, but for the many countries that are still entangled in severe financial difficulties.”

Lord Adair Turner, former chair, Financial Services Authority

“House of Debt is a very important book, reaching beyond surface explanations of the Great Recession to identify the fundamental cause—excessive private debt built up in the pre-crisis boom years. It combines meticulous empirical research with an ability to see the big picture. Its message needs to be heeded and its proposals for reform seriously considered if we are to avoid repeating in future the mistakes of the past.”

...But in The Good Jobs Strategy, Zeynep Ton, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, makes the compelling case that even in low-cost settings, leaving employees behind—with bad jobs—is a choice, not a necessity. Drawing on more than a decade of research, Ton shows how operational excellence enables companies to of­fer the lowest prices to customers while ensuring good jobs for their employees and superior results for their investors.

Ton describes the elements of the good jobs strategy in a variety of successful companies around the world, including Southwest Airlines, UPS, Toyota, Zappos, and In-N-Out Burger. She focuses on four model retailers—Costco, Merca­dona, Trader Joe’s, and QuikTrip—to demonstrate the good jobs strategy at work and reveals four choices that have transformed these compa­nies’ high investment in workers into lower costs, higher profits, and greater customer sat­isfaction.

Paper showing that companies that treat their employees better beat their peers by more than 2.3% in stock returns. http://t.co/lpaCXhVVKc

Published on the occasion of Richard C. Levin’s retirement as president of Yale University, this captivating collection of speeches and essays from the past decade reflects both his varied intellectual passions and his deep commitment to university life and leadership. Whether discussing the economic implications of climate change or speaking to an incoming class of Yale freshmen, he argues for the vital importance of scholarship and the critical role that universities play in educating students and promoting the overall well-being of our society.

This collection is a sequel to The Work of the University, which contained the principal writings from Levin’s first decade as Yale’s president, and it enunciates many of the same enduring themes: forging a strong partnership with the city of New Haven, rebuilding Yale’s physical infrastructure, strengthening science and engineering, and internationalizing the university. But this companion volume also captures the essence of university leadership. In addressing topics as varied as his personal sources of inspiration, the development of Asian universities, and the university’s role in promoting innovation and economic growth, Levin challenges the reader to be more engaged, more creative, more innovative, and above all, a better global citizen. Throughout, his commitment to and affection for Yale shines through...

The company has named Rick Levin, formerly president of Yale University for two decades, as CEO.

So in case you were still wondering if Coursera might have ambitions of usurping the role of traditional higher education, the answer is no. Levin’s latest book, “The Worth of the University,” argues for the critical role of the university in society...

Saturday, 22 February 2014

In February 2011, the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, appointed him as a principal adviser and head of the analysis team at the Bureau of European Policy Advisers, the president's personal think-tank.

Before that, Legrain was a visiting fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics, a senior fellow at the Lisbon Council for Economic Competitiveness and Social Renewal...

Shortlisted for the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award

"Mr. Legrain performs an invaluable service; he makes a good case for the unpopular cause of free flows of people. The book is a superb combination of direct reportage with detailed analysis of the evidence."--Martin Wolf, Financial Times

"Mr. Legrain has assembled powerful evidence to undermine the economic arguments against immigration."--Economist

"In all important respects Legrain is right on target…. In the context of the fearful chatter that surrounds the subject, sense as good as this needs cherishing."--Guardian

"A magnificent document. It provides faculty, journalists, scientists, and policy makers with the information they need to confront and analyze this increasingly important problem . . . , and to assure that long standing concerns for academic freedom, ethical integrity, and the traditional values of the university will have a fighting chance throughout the United States." --Gerald Markowitz, Distinguished Professor of History, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

"The 56 General Principles provide a nearly constitutional template for clearer understanding of how academy and industry collaborate today, and how they may do so more effectively in the future. Not to be missed is an invaluable Appendix giving exact language to use in incorporating these recommendations into faculty handbooks and collective bargaining agreements." --Robert M. O’Neill, president emeritus of the University of Virginia and founding director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression

Questions about the status, identity and legitimacy of business schools in the modern university system continue to stimulate debate amongst deans, educational policy makers and commentators. In this book, three world experts share their critical insights on management education and new business school models in the USA, Europe and Asia, on designing the business school of the future, and how to make it work. They look at how the business school is changing and focus in particular on emergent global challenges and innovations in curricula, professional roles, pedagogy, uses of technology and organisational delineations. Set within the context of a wider discussion about management as a profession, the authors provide a systematic, historical perspective, analysing major trends in business school models, and reviewing a wealth of current literature, to provide an informed and unique perspective that is firmly grounded in practical and experimental analysis.

ZDNetUK Summary of the book "Copyright Masquerade": The way in which corporations and other stakeholders seek to manipulate the formulation of intellectual property legislation around the world is an important story, and one that's well told in this engaging and informative book.

Monica Horten seems to like to write the kind of book that most people would find acutely painful: studies of the complex and lengthy routes by which EU legislation is formed. She is particularly interested in the machinations surrounding copyright: her previous book studied copyright law's colonisation of the telecoms package — itself an unusually abstruse area of law...

In this interview, Intellectual Property Watch’s William New sat down with Prof. Chidi Oguamanam, a professor in the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law, to talk about his recent book, “Intellectual Property in Global Governance: A Development Question.” The book, published by Routledge, covers issues of the knowledge economy, structures and regime dynamics, human rights, agriculture, traditional/indigenous knowledge, traditional cultural expressions/folklore, and management of intellectual property in global governance.

Intellectual Property Watch (IPW):Could you please tell us about the book?

Chidi Oguamanam (CO): The first thing that will strike you is how the work brings the concept of global governance into IP analytical framework. Normally, when you talk about global governance, it resonates with the social and political scientists, administrators, development and international relations practitioners and miscellaneous actors at the global level, but hardly with those involved in IP law and policy. So, this work adds to the new trend in interdisciplinary exploration and understanding of IP.

IPW:How does the book address international organisations and IP policy?

CO: Most discussions about IP have been about regimes and institutions, such as WIPO, WTO, UNESCO, FAO, WHO, UNCTAD, etc. These include core IP regimes and institutions as well as those that are peripheral in regard to the subject of IP. But rarely has there been an attempt to weave the operational dynamics of these actors and institutions within the framework of global governance with a dedicated focus on IP.

The book explores how has IP has increasingly become ubiquitous in almost all critical sites of international law and policy, including trade, development, health, agriculture, environment, climate change, biotechnology and ICTs and their ramifications for north-south relations which constitute an integral aspect of global governance dynamic...